Is there a module to set a password-protect per node for anonymous users? I'd like to protect some nodes to show it only to those who have the password, without having to create a user account. I've found one for Drupal 6 it has a 7 version but it doesn't have any non-dev releases. And there's another one for Drupal 7 but this one requires the user to register and paste the password to their user profile which is not what I need.

I was able to get the protected_node 7.x-1.x-dev release to work, in this case password-protecting single nodes of type Basic Page, after some debugging and making 11 (yes, eleven) code changes. I found that the password entered when editing the node content was being double-encrypted due to a duplicate call to hook_node_update, and a quick solution was to remove the 11 calls to sha1(), disabling password encryption. The pros and cons of doing this are infinitely debatable, but it was an efficient way to meet both the need and a deadline. This buys some time until further debugging can be done, and hopefully it will help others.

I've also tried the protected_node module for a similar project and haven't been able to get the 7.x development release to work as expected which is unfortunate since I haven't found another module that offers the same functionality -- most of the 'password protection' solutions are focused on protecting files, not individual nodes.

To get our project to work, we tried the custom solution suggested here on stackoverflow:

This would work best if you had a limited number of pages you wanted to protect and didn't need an interface to change or add these frequently. Short of that, the next best alternative is to try and push the development of the protected_node module in the issues queue.